EVENTS

In this week’s installment of William Lane Craig’s book On Guard, he wraps up Chapter 3 by inadvertently exposing the fatal flaw in Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument. If you’re going to argue that some things exist “by a necessity of their own nature,” you need to make sure they really exist first. If that explanation can’t work for a universe that we all can see and examine and verify, it damn sure ain’t gonna fly for concepts of God that only exist in the minds and imaginations of fallible and self-deluding believers.

Who knows what West thinks the “parody” would be here. Apparently, you can accuse “Darwinists” of promoting Nazism all day long, and everything’s just peachy, but if one of THEM dares to do the same to YOU, why, gosh, that’s just so over the top, it’s, it’s…well, I mean really. Even if that’s not actually what they really said.

[I have to be out of town today and tomorrow, so I thought I’d cheat and replay some old Evangelical Realism posts. This one, from August 2007, is my all-time greatest hit (according to my stats log, that is).]

A blogger at passionateamerica.com has a bit of Monday Morning “humor” that (perhaps without meaning to) gives us a good hard look at how God really “works”:

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was a vowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform.

The professor was out cold. The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America ’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid stuff and act like an a$$. So, He sent me.”

Some of the best Gospel disproofs are right out in plain sight. Take the Empty Tomb for instance. Everybody’s heard of it. It’s the centerpiece of the Easter story. It’s the core of the Christian apologetic for Jesus actually rising from the dead.

Nobody ever stops to think how very very odd it is that the Empty Tomb would end up in such a pre-eminent place.

I think you can be an angry atheist — fiery, furious, enraged about religion both in its theory and its practice — and have your response to that anger be to organize the atheist bowling team. The atheist picnic. The atheist sewing circle. The atheist potluck supper. The atheist blood drive. The atheist book club.

I think that is an entirely appropriate, wildly useful response to atheist anger.

The only thing I’d change is that I personally would rather see “ex-Christian” rather than specifically “atheist.” Because, you know, do you really want to go straight from “born again” to atheist? Well, ok, *I* went straight from born-again to atheist, but I mean, maybe not everybody would. And I think America needs ex-Christians more than it needs chummy [ick, terrible word choice] socialization opportunities for atheists.

I see Vox Day is up to his usual form. Writing for WorldNetDaily, he tries to dilute the impact of the Treaty of Tripoli by a bit of heavy-handed framing.

[T]he argument that America was never a Christian nation relies upon a common atheist trick, in this case, the substitution of the word “nation” for “government.” What is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion? Is it “the United States of America”? Is it “the American people”? No, it is “the Government of the United States of America.”

Notice it’s the atheists who are trying to “trick” you into confusing the American nation with the American government. No Christian (like David Barton, for instance) would ever try to conflate “nation” and “government” in such a way as to make it sound like our laws and government institutions (e.g. public schools) had a right and/or obligation to give preference to Christianity.

Never thought I’d say it, but a report in the New York Daily News may force me to support a few Republican politicians.

ALBANY – An anti-gay marriage group is launching a billboard attack against Republican senators who voted in favor of same-sex unions.

The National Organization for Marriage plans to place billboards in the districts of four GOP state senators who broke ranks and voted to legalize gay marriage in June.

Head Bigot Brian Brown says the group is planning on spending $40,000 on the initial run of billboards, in addition to $150,000 already spent on direct mail campaigns attacking the senators and seeking their defeat in the 2012 elections.

I suppose if they succeed, it will at least simplify the process of telling the good guys from the bad guys.

PS: Check out the actual URL for that article and see if you can figure out which side the web guy(s) at nydailynews.com might be on…

The Christian Post reports that anti-gay author Dr. Frank Turek is finding it just a little bit harder to sell his team-building consultancy services after publishing a book promoting discrimination against many of the employees and customers of his prospective clients.

Just months after being fired from Cisco Systems in California over an anti-gay marriage book, Christian consultant Dr. Frank Turek was also given the boot from Bank of America.

“I get a lot of flak for just actually agreeing with what a majority of Americans agree on and that is that marriage is between one man and one woman,” Turek said this past week on American Family Radio.

He’s being just a bit dishonest, of course. If all he were doing was defending the freedom to believe that marriage is between one man and one woman, then that would be fine. It’s a bigoted and ignorant opinion, but freedom of speech means that people are allowed to hold bigoted and ignorant opinions, as long as they don’t try to force their bigotry on others in a way that violates their civil and human rights. That last bit, however, is exactly what Dr. Turek and his fellow believers are trying to do, which is why he’s taking some heat for it.